Many decades ago, astrophysicists realized that certain problems could only be solved in higher dimensions than the four—the fourth being time—that humans can perceive. Today, super-string theory, an outgrowth of quantum mechanics, solves its equations in ten-dimensional spacetime.
It turns out that the arts aren’t as far behind the sciences as we might have thought.
While of course virtual reality is enabled by emerging science and technology, those who build environments, develop scenarios for VR apps, and write narratives for augmented reality, augmented virtuality, and virtual reality properties are properly deemed artists.
And what these creative pioneers are doing—and teaching the rest of us to do—is to think in not just five but six dimensions. We may not all be astrophysicists, but merely by putting on a VR headset we are empowered to change not just what we perceive but how we perceive.
In short, virtual reality gives humanity ready access to the fifth and sixth dimensions.
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A good explanation of the fifth and sixth dimensions can be found here, but the short version is this: to perceive the fifth dimension is to see all possible futures originating from the present moment; to perceive the sixth dimension is to see all possible versions of a given A-to-B sequence—for instance, every series of fortunate or unfortunate events that could have followed from your birth and would precede your death.
Scientists have for years been using higher dimensions like these to explore the mysteries of physics. One might have thought that, in the meantime, we artists would be exploring these dimensions as well to better map the mysteries of the human mind, but thus far that hasn’t happened. While the popularization of the internet in the 1990s created many new possibilities, in themselves these only gave us the tools to—through multimedia, transmedia, and hypermedia—more robustly explore the four dimensions we already perceive.
The emergence of VR tech is in an inflection point in human history not just because it in effect augments our dimensional perception by 50%, but also because it enables each nation’s creative infrastructure to become equal in status to its analytical infrastructure. A worldwide creative renaissance is certain to accompany the technological one that we already know virtual reality brings with it. This means that in the coming years, the critical theories that undergird contemporary art practice in the United States will cease to be academic to most Americans. Instead of thinking of critical theory as an exercise in abstraction, it will become something a great many of us experience, enjoy, and sometimes struggle with in real time. The reason for this is that VR is a technology that conspicuously performs its foundational principles with every use.
Whereas the postmodernism of the Age of Television encouraged those interested in its cultural paradigms to use ornate “deconstructions” to understand the small screen’s theoretical bases, the post-postmodernism known as “metamodernism” that underwrites all virtual reality projects is best understood experientially.
In other words, it takes only donning an HMD to understand how and why virtual reality offers a revolution in critical theory and artistic production as well as technology. What in the past took years of undergraduate and graduate study in “post-structuralism” is now self-evident in the way a VR user’s perceptions are altered. The dominant cultural paradigm of the digital age, metamodernism, is indeed performed in real time by nearly all of our most popular cultural practices—everything from literary and musical remixing to videogame “modding,” from comic-book retconning to transmedia fan fiction, from meme culture to virtual reality projects—rather than being an after-the-fact gloss of works of art few understood or consumed in the first place. (For more on metamodernism, see here.)
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Source: VR Scout